College unions might have unintended consequences

A regional National Labor Relations Board ruling allowing one college football team to unionize is the first move in what will be a very long, complicated and drawn-out process.

That makes it foolish to attempt to make any profound pronouncements, such as this being the beginning of the end for college interscholastic athletics, or that Kain Colter is now to amateur sports what baseball free-agency pioneer Curt Flood was to pro sports.

While tossing this around with a friend, we did come up with, nearly simultaneously, two words to describe what will come about when all is said and done, who knows when:

Unintended consequences.

And that is why — although some lawyers say this is not a Title IX issue because it is about compensation and not opportunity — Patsy T. Mink comes to mind when I think of Colter and what his legacy may become, or at least part of it.

I’m certain that when the congresswoman from Hawaii spearheaded legislation aimed at crushing higher education discrimination based on gender she did not intend to cripple and in some cases kill men’s sports like wrestling and cross country. But that’s what happened.

Sports wasn’t even what Title IX was really about at first. Mink’s primary motivation wasn’t because women didn’t have college athletic opportunities. It was because women were vastly underrepresented in medical schools. It would be just as appropriate to name a hospital after her as a soccer field.

And so it is with Colter and his Northwestern teammates. They are talking more about working conditions and health concerns than money. But, this is college athletics, and that means it can’t help but be turned into an issue that will be about money, and to a very large degree.

For sake of discussion, let’s call the big, money-making conferences the rich in this equation and the players on those schools’ football and men’s basketball teams the poor. If they unionize, the rich get a little poorer and poor get richer (with a better overall compensation package).

That leaves us with this obvious question: Where does the collateral damage begin and end?

Non-revenue sports at the big schools? All sports at mid-majors like the University of Hawaii?

What of the lower NCAA divisions and the NAIA? Can they remain non-union for the sake of economics?

Unions are supposed to protect vulnerable and otherwise powerless workers. It is extremely debatable if many big-time college athletes at big-time programs in power conferences fit that description. I go back and forth on it myself.

But when you see up close what happens to many college athletes because of their lack of leverage, at all levels, some aspects of union protection make a lot of sense. I’ve seen players get run off when coaching changes are made, including at UH, largely facilitated by that terrible one-year renewable scholarship rule that Colter and his crew want to get rid of.

Coaches paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year are union members and the players some of them treat like indentured servants are not. Like I said, I’m very far from conclusions, but that is one of the realities that could use some type of reform.

Reach Star-Advertiser sports columnist Dave Reardon at dreardon@staradvertiser.com, his "Quick Reads" blog at staradvertiser.com and twitter.com/davereardon.